Apartment Pitch Would Turn Life Into An Art Form

COMMENTARY

March 25, 1987|By RUSSELL BAKER, The New York Times

In the Wish-They-Wouldn`t Department, how about that expensive Manhattan apartment house that elevates living to an art form? Yes, that is its threat. ``From its mansard roof to its wood-and-leather lobby,`` reads its ad in The New Yorker, it ``elevates living to an art form.``

The people selling space in this building obviously think a lot of us want living elevated to an art form. Perhaps so. Be warned about art-form living, though. The minute you take up art you are going to have the critics all over you.

For instance: Suppose you have paid $263,000 for the cheapest one-bedroom apartment available in this building. It`s more than you can afford, but, ``So what! Let`s live a little,`` you said to your family.

The art lover in you has succumbed to the promise of the mansard roof and wood-and-leather lobby. You had visions of a blockbuster exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with maddened hordes of art lovers studying your techniques for loading the dishwasher and defeating plaque buildup with a vibrating toothbrush application of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide.

``With that roof and that lobby,`` you told skeptical old Grandmother, ``living will be elevated into an art form for the whole darn family.``

So there you are. One bedroom. Mansard roof. Wood-and-leather lobby. Grandmother sleeping on a daybed in the sitting room. Cats in the bathtub. Kids in sleeping bags on the kitchen floor. Thank Heaven you had only two, and recently enough so both still fit in the kitchen.

Come home one night and what do you find? Critics in the parlor. You are not going to like the reviews. Here are just a few of many points they are going to make:

1. The art-form living that goes on in your apartment is too accessible to the mass audience. It`s like Andrew Wyeth`s painting. You don`t have to be a critic to enjoy it. For example, your stacking of the dishwasher shows no new ideas later than those of the revisionist dishwasher stackers who showed their seminal work at the Museum of Modern Art of Living`s historic exhibition (``Dirty Dishes: New Visions``) in 1964.

At least one critic will write: ``The poverty of vision here is illustrated by yet another tired attack on plaque buildup with vibrating toothbrush applications of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide. One would be grateful even for some sentimental salute to the past art of living -- perhaps having the family bathe only on Saturday night in a galvanized tub -- but no, all is triteness.``

2. The art of living which you practice is ``derivative.`` The meaning of ``derivative`` is vague, but never mind, critics love it. They will say letting the frying pan soak overnight in the sink instead of putting it in the dishwasher is so derivative it was done in Pleistocene time. In art, newness is all.

Think you might arrive home from the office containing three martinis, kick the cats out of the bathtub, beat both children and break up some furniture while fighting with your wife? Forget it. ``Derivative,`` the critics will say. ``He has obviously seen Edward Albee`s `Virginia Woolf` and, lacking a personal creative vision, wastes our time with derivative material.``

3. Your conception of the art form called living is hopelessly antique. Artwise, this is, after all, the age of the postmoderns, not to mention the deconstructionists.

You don`t know about postmodernism? Never heard of deconstruction? Yet you have the gall to take up precious space between a mansard roof and a wood-and- leather lobby under the illusion that you can become a Michelangelo of the art form known as living?

Here is a sample of what the critics will do to you:

``... and, worst of all, we are treated yet again to the tired old struggle against plaque without the least hint of a suggestion that plaque would be of small consequence to the human condition if modern dentistry did not prevent man from losing his teeth in adolescence, thus making hydrogen peroxide and baking soda unnecessary items in the medicine cabinets of the aging.

``Doesn`t anyone in the roof-and-lobby school of art realize that living as an art form turned its back forever on plaque fighting once the French dentilists extracted all their teeth to illustrate the absurdity of using the smile as a political test of ability to govern?``

It does no good to get angry at the critics and send them abusive mail saying, ``If you know so much about living as an art form, why don`t you try doing it?`` This entitles them to reply, ``We may be critics, but we`re not idiots.``